I talk about the problems of automating the every-day world around us
This was a little narrative I wrote one day going over a day in my garden and thoughts that filled my mind on that day
I detail one of my favorite days of 2023, spending the whole day working on projects including a planter box
I make one of my favorite dishes: chicken and brussel sprouts, as well as talk about the benefits of cooking at home
Since I was a young boy I wanted to go out, build shelters, and survive off only my own hands. I have a vivid memory of begging my parents to let me camp out overnight in the woods near my school when I was six. As I've grown older it's stuck with me, strengthened by all those years at summer camp, hiking, backpacking, learning valuable skills for being self reliant.
Some time around when I got my first job, I looked up "land" on ebay to find that there were a number of affordable listings, still out of my budget, but only just nearly out of reach. Later on when I was working for my parents, I got to experience the joy of working with my hands and improving land. The eudaimonic rush of sitting down after a hard day of work and seeing all of what I had accomplished.
This summer I've discovered the wonders of reclaimed wood. Being able to take what was once mere trash and repurposing it into something useful once again. Sawing through pallets and scavenging the piles of trash that line the streets for sections of plywood or half-rotted 2x4s fills me with joy and lights that spark of creativity within me. I've built a couple planter boxes and used parts for my new desk, but it has made me ache to build something larger, a structure of some sort.
A few weeks ago on a whim, I looked up "land" once again on ebay and was met with the realization that I was fully capable of affording a small acre plot in a beautiful remote part of north-eastern California. I impulsively bid on one of the numerous auctions and won. Within a few days this distant dream suddenly was tangible.
Yesterday was my first time driving up to finally see it and get started. I packed just about every tool I could possibly need and six deconstructed pallets, along with camping supplies and headed off on my grand journey. The five and a half hour drive took me through the beautiful landscape of northern California, through winding mountain passes, over roaring rivers, past towns whose population size would drop from the triple, to the double, to the single digits. Periodically I'd put on a Marty Robbins' cowboy ballad as I rode into my new west.
Finally I had arrived down the gravel road to the coordinates and bore witness to the beauty of my humble lot that I had dreamed of. A neighbor spotted me from his porch and helped me to find it, as the lot markers had long rusted away or been damaged by the snow. Over the course of our conversation he mentioned how a lot of people had done as I did, only to turn back when they made the realization that they couldn't start anything without the required septic and well systems installed. This sounded odd to me as my reading through of the bylaws made no mention of such a requirement. Once he returned to his home I pulled up the property owners association website once again and realized that I had made a mistake. The "Unit 3" marker was not the same as "Lot 3" label, and that lot 3 was part of the subdivided unit 3 of the property owners association, which came with a long list of required permits and rules I would be subject to in order to build anything as simple as a fence. As I read each line, my plans were smashed one by one through my head. I found myself once again surrounded by the system I had traveled so far in order to escape.
I cried in my car for a while, before accepting my fate and deciding to make the most of what I could with the night. I sat around the small fire I had built, the tendrils of impermanence tearing deep to my soul. I found myself scrolling through listings once again, waiting for each page to load over the single bar of signal, that fire withing me still smoldering through the bucket of water that was poured upon it.
This was a setback, but not one I can't recover from. I'm able to back out of the deal and will only be out $200, not my most costly mistake. I'll keep looking and saving, but I'm not giving up on this dream, and not wasting my youth to live a slave to a system I so despise.
I am not nor have I ever been a fan of Donald Trump. I am not conservative nor a member of any Republican organizations. I got my political origins as a left-Democrat, became a hardcore communist through much of my teenage years, and now am now largely politically homeless, with no firm ideology. Though, I am very critical of both parties, I am often more critical of the left, because I want it to be better.
That being said, When I heard the guilty verdict on Donald Trump's first trial, my stomach dropped, and when I saw the celebrations by Liberals, it sank further. This is a clear political prosecution, why else would would they have waited three whole years until the next election for them to hold this trial? Why else would a misdemeanor be escalated to a felony using a roundabout interpretation of the law, counting the same crime as two separate ones? Now the Democrats, and the media outlets loyal to them, revel in their adding the "convicted felon" moniker whenever possible following the conviction. With the divisive times we are living in, Donald Trump could never get a fair jury trial, from either side.
It's evident this did not have a major impact on the popularity of Trump, it's still the case that, as of June 18th Biden and Trump are neck and neck, with Trump leading in key swing states. Trump's constituents have a distrust in the system and this only strengthens their prior opinion. What worries me is what comes next, of which I can only see a few outcomes:
If Biden wins, a major section of the Republican party will say the election was fraudulent or rigged in some manner, as it did with the 2020 election. The flames of deep political divisiveness will be stoked yet again and the can of discontent will be kicked down the road, to hopefully another Trump campaign in 2028. I say hopefully because I worry of what figure will fill the void of Trump's exit from politics. While there are moderate conservatives who are a part of the Trump movement, a major faction of the MAGA movement is what was referred to until recently as the alt-right, who have already adopted a by-any-means-necessary mindset. It wouldn't take much for another charismatic leader to rise, one that may not be as moderate as Trump. At the end of the day Trump's first term didn't differ much from the conservative status quo, with the exception of the lack of starting any new wars. A new representative of this ever-growing political cleavage could lean into the xenophobia, as did Trump in 2016. This likely would spark heightened targeting of "domestic terrorism", the needs of Americans will continue to not be met, tensions will build, and the stop-watch towards the beginning of the second American civil war will creep ever-closer.
Trump never prosecuted Clinton, as he had promised in his campaign, which is probably a good thing. This time however, he has precedent of prosecuting political rivals on his side, he too will be able to dig up dirt on either Biden or other DNC operatives, and prosecute them. This will throw gas on the flames, the wolf-calling of the Democrats will cause this to fall on deaf ears, and when it is listened to, people will point to Trumps trial. Politics will cease to hold up the veil of trying to represent people, merely trying to beat out the opposition through law-fare, things will continue to get worse, people will be jailed and pardoned from one administration to the next, particular political allegiances will be de-facto criminalized, and we will live in a increasingly authoritarian society.
He will continue to make outlandish statements, he might make a few executive orders that makes life harder in America for a handful of marginalized identities, but nothing will fundamentally change. The bad actors that stick around from administration to administration will continue to push the agenda of the wealthy elite. We will fund coups overseas, further gut the middle class, push opiates onto the poor, and allow for controlled opposition. People will continue in their radicalization or apathy until there is a revolution, either political or bloody.
The weaponization of the courts will further put into question the justice of our legal system. "Is the conviction fair, or was it because of the political leanings of the judge?" will become a question that will continue to be raised again and again. While I am not one to aggrandize the perfection of the American system of government, separating the judicial branch was done for a reason. Elections ought to be decided by the populace, not by lawsuits and electioneering.
This was also a political plot, being able to point to Hunter's conviction does nothing but serve as a justification of Trumps. Let's not forget that he was going to get a "sweetheart" deal from the Department of Justice until the judge said anything. I'll be surprised if Hunter ever sees more than a few days behind bars in a cushy jail, if he even gets that.
The options for viable web-browsers seems to shrink more and more every year, that is if you don't count chromium spin-offs. Time after time I find myself itching for something a bit more lean, something with a different vision for how one should interact with the web. However, each time I would find myself making my way back to firefox, because nothing rivaled it's mix of speed and feature-set, occasionally running chromium for those one-off problematic sites.
I've come to accept that I am going to have to run something relatively mainstream for my primary web-browser, but have found a gap that these alternatives can occupy: surfing small websites. I'm subscribed to indieseek.xyz's new listing feed and normally start from there in my rss feed reader. Then I have it set to open up pages in one of these alternative browsers, and surf away from there, being linked from page to page all over the independent web. Before I would use qutebrowser, but have found that I'm too trained to traditional, single-modal web-browsers and would forget to enter insert mode whenever typing in a text field. Though their type-to-follow link feature is really cool and wish other browsers had it. I've found that badwolf has been perfect for my use-case.
Saying it is lightweight is putting it too mildly, it doesn't even have search by default, but since I merely follow links, that isn't a feature I need. It has javascript disabled by default, which hasn't been an issue for small sites, and if it ever does, there is an easy toggle-button right at the top. In fact it's made the occasional link to the mainstream web quite nice, due to ads not being able to load. Also due to its small feature-set it loads nearly instantly, even on my moto g4 play running postmarket OS. It's no replacement for a full-featured browser, but it's the perfect blog reader.
It being our first time we went with a group, led by a charismatic 30-something wielding a wooden staff with a carved morel at the top. We all met up at a trailhead in the Sly Park area, and then continued up the road to one of the spots our fearless leader had picked out.
When we arrived at our first location, he pointed out a few areas of interest, and then had us scatter and begin looking. It took about 20 minutes until they found the first one, and everyone was called up to see it. The leader was sure to stand next to it, but not point directly to it, in order for us to see how difficult it is to spot them. Sure enough it was just a little bump in the ground that took a few seconds to find, even when you were staring right at it. We searched for another 45 minutes in the area and were on our way back to the cars when someone in the group found another couple, though they were the only ones.
We took a little break for lunch, which I regretfully didn't bring, but it gave the leader a chance to show off the fungi to look out for.
This is the violet cup that he said often grow right next to morels.
I forget the name he called this one, but he said they are an indicator that you are in the right general area, but to look under a different tree.
Then we set off for our second location. Almost immediately someone found a small grouping as we made our way down the steep hillside. For the first hour or so me and my father didn't find anything, just zig-zagging back and forth. This area was a lot more in line with what he described than the first. As we made our way down we could hear little excited yelps of "Found one", which kept us motivated. Eventually we came across a little section that looked ripe and away from the other spots the rest of the group had already trodden through. I saw a little bundle of young firs, and just had a strong feeling deep in my gut I'd find something there. Sure enough as I pushed away a small branch I looked down and right there before me was my first find of the day.
It was a small grouping of two, but it threw gas on the fire that was our hunt. We combed through the area, finding one every five minutes or so. Eventually we reached the end of the little section of woods and decided we were happy with our little haul of five beautiful morels. We made the trek back up the hill, back through the little patch hoping we missed one, though to no avail. We were both pretty tired and hungry, and decided to call it a day, though the rest of the group headed to another final location.
This was really a wonderful experience and I'm excited to do it more often, though it is almost the end of the season this year. I love being outdoors, but having a purpose behind it makes it all the better. I remember in a talk or podcast episode, the bigfooter Cliff Barackman saying something along the lines of, "Even if you don't find anything, bigfooting gives you a purpose for being outside". While morels are a lot easier to find than elusive apes, it's a similar rush, an eagerness to explore with purpose.
It was a bittersweet ending. It felt like that store was part of who I was, the place I found my true self, the place where so many of my happiest memories of the past year and a half had orbited around. I knew it was never going to be a place I worked forever, but I wished it ended on a happier note.
About a month before I left, the resident jackass of the store, Chuck, blew up at Maria for not doing the closing chores, which she had completed. She won't let people walk all over her, a trait which I love about her, and she made sure to escalate the incident to the store manager, Mike. At first things were looking hopeful, this was far from the first time Chuck overstepped while power-tripping, and rumor around the store was that he was going to be demoted. Finally some justice was to be had, after one of his blow-ups being no small part in Roomie's departure from the store, and countless other times he had hurt my friends. Though, a week later when it was evident he was just getting another slap on the wrist and nothing would be done, my faith in the store died. Maria put in her resignation that day, and mine came in a couple weeks later once I had found another job. Those last few days were tortuous, my body ached with malice, the overwhelming urge to knock over every shelf was hard to hold back. I had sacrificed so many weekends, so many holidays, so many hours, because somewhere inside I though it would in some way pay off, that by putting in my all, it would pay off in some way. Sure, I'd see it in the customers' faces when I'd go above and beyond trying to find a solution to their problem, even getting pretty banged up a number of times making brackets for people. In the end it turned out not to really reward me, but in a way that lesson is it's own reward.
No longer working together has only positively impacted Maria and I's relationship. We were somewhat worried we would struggle to find the time to be together, no longer having a guaranteed sixteen and a half hours together every week with our shifts together, but it has not been an issue. The time we do spend together now is more rewarding, not having to put on a professional face, getting to enjoy our time with outings and little activities instead of unpacking the daily drama in the parking lot. I feel closer to her than ever before, and it grows every day. Her coming into my life is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me. I met her mother for the first time this weekend and it felt good, being a part of her family, taking that next step.
The first job I got accepted for, which led to me quitting the store, was short lived. I was a sales representative for Intel, which I was initially excited about, being able to work somewhat in the computer industry. However after the first day, I realized it was not a good fit for me. I did not have any real direction, just to push Intel products and Norton anti-virus. Intel makes good processors, but when I was standing in the store and looking at the offerings by AMD, I realized I was going to have to push inferior products, which did not sit well with me. I sent in my letter of resignation, and decided to just do Doordash until I found something else.
Fortunately I never ended up having to Doordash, quickly finding an IT position at a local community college which was urgently hiring. Not only did it pay better than both the store and the sales rep position, it had better hours and was truly in the computing field. My first day was a couple weeks ago and it's starting to feel normal to me. I'm still getting the hang of all their systems, which are fairly disorganized between online and local students, but it's making more sense. Getting used to working with Windows again is frustrating, but a necessary evil, until Linux takes over the desktop.
I find myself with a lot of free time during my shift, and with it being in the evening, my days are pretty much completely open. With school being out until August, I have a lot of opportunities to get personal projects done. I don't find myself exhausted at the end of each day, I feel excited for the next one that awaits.
This was an enjoyable one, with so many changes and formative moments of my life occurring in the background of it. I admittedly have fallen out of regularly writing on this blog, but I hope to change that and update my massive fan base of the edge-of-seat exciting moments of my deeply fascinating life. Throughout all this excitement I have thought about all the things I've wanted to do, if I only had the free time. Well now with the next three months being pretty much completely open, here they are:
Between work, school, and spending time with Maria, my fitness has fallen to the wayside. I'm hoping to get back into working out and doing more physical activities again. Maria wants to as well and I think it will be fun to share that with her. She makes me feel so confident which I think will take away a lot of the stress that exercising with others has in the past.
Feedie++ is a rewrite of my original terminal feed reading app, Feedie, but in C++ instead of Python. I've learned a lot since I originally wrote Feedie, and want to build a more robust and performant program. I started the rewrite at the beginning of the year, but as coursework became more demanding, I haven't been working on it as much.
My current desk is a bit larger than I really need and I think it would be a fun project to try. I haven't made any sort of furniture before but I think It will be a fun challenge.
I've been eating home-cooked meals a bit more recently than I had been before, but I hope to do that even more. It really is so much better tasting and saves money.
For the past eight years, one of my background projects I've worked on has been a hand-held mini laptop. I got my first semi-working design over spring break, but it was a bit to fragile to actually use and I never got wifi fully working on it. I think one more iteration will do the trick, but we will see.
It gets a bit too shaky for my liking above 90 MPH and you have to be very light on the accelerator when going up a gear. I got the part, but in all of Saab's great wisdom, it's pretty hard to access so I've been putting it off.
Last summer after July, my garden sorta fell to the wayside, I'm hoping that doesn't happen again.
We have been talking about doing so many things this summer, but I really want to go on a camping trip or something like that with her. Maybe to Oregon.
I've started so many posts only to get distracted and lose my train of thought. I really miss writing and want to get back in the swing of it. This is made easier with my new job too, since some nights there really isn't much to do.
I could keep going on and on about things I want to do, I don't want to waste away in my room all day, I want to live and be busy with things that fill me with joy.
This makes it kinda annoying following a tech release, because almost half of the video will be showing how well it performs in the new hot game, talking about how much more FPS you will get, when none of this is at all applicable to me. Sure, games can be a great benchmark for performance and using them as such is a good way of comparing one piece of hardware to the other, but it seems like half of the actual coverage is just a screen recording and the host going "WOW WOULD YOU LOOK HOW FAST THIS GAME IS PLAYING". Now some of this certainly is just because I haven't made a concerted effort to actually find non-gaming tech content, with many of the channels I watch being holdovers from my teenage years, where I did have an interest in games.
I built my first PC for the soul purpose of being able to play games I couldn't on my dad's old Core2 Duo iMac. When I got it running, I was amazed by the sheer quantity of games I was able to play, spending countless hours scrolling through the free section of steam, downloading, and playing, only to delete them and never touch them again. Even then, I wasn't sitting on the edge of my seat for new releases, waiting for leaks about the next big release; it was very passive, just a way to spend my time, since I didn't have many friends to occupy that time. As I got older, games took up less and less of that time, being replaced with more fruitful hobbies.
Studying Computer Science, I find myself feeling like an outsider in my classroom. I hear my peers going on and on about the games they play and finding a form of kinship through them, while I hack away at my config files in the corner. I thought that maybe here I would find people who share my flavor of interest in technology, but I have yet to find one. Even outside of the classroom, trying to talk to males my age often ends up with them mentioning a hot new game like it's commonplace, and I've never heard of it. It makes me think that maybe I should try to get back into it, but I always get left with the same bad taste in my mouth whenever I try.
Games leave me feeling really stressed out. The only thing I could think about while playing is "I could be doing something productive with this time". The main exception to this is social games that I'll occasionally play with my friends, but with that the reason I'm playing is really because it's the only option that allows us to talk while doing something. The other exception to this rule is Minecraft, which I find scratches that same creative itch that working on other hobbies has, though this only lasts for a couple weeks until it too gives me that uneasy feeling that I'm wasting my time.
I struggle to find how I really feel about games. Part of me knows that they don't do anything productive and makes me view them negatively. Another part recognizes that they aren't really a social-ill and are a way for people to connect who otherwise wouldn't have. Not to mention their great entry-point for people to get into technology, like it did for me all those years ago.
It was a Christmas gift from a family friend and one of the greatest gifts I have ever received, that being said it was fairly limited in capability. The build plate was fairly small, the bed was a pain to level, requiring an alan key to adjust, and was prone to issues. Nevertheless, it sparked off my interest in printing and got the job done. Me and a couple buddies ran an underground fidget-spinner black market at our school in 2017 back when they had become the hot new item. I had to have printed at least 50 before we could tell teachers were catching onto us and we decided to close up shop before we got into any trouble. We raked in about $100 net profit and had a blast running our little hustle. Those were good times.
For the rest of high school I barely touched the thing, besides the odd job here and there, mostly due to the pain it was getting everything set up and troubleshooted after being left to collect dust for months or years on end.
Then one day, shortly after moving to Sacramento, I was scouring craigslist when I found a lightly used Creality Ender 3 v1 for sale at the decent price of $100. I thought of all the things I had wanted to print in years past that I couldn't because of the limitations of the mini and quickly jumped on the listing.
This was a huge step up, significantly faster with a larger build plate, with plenty of good information online to support it. I loved the thing, but was still pained every time I needed to manually level the bed, though the adjustment knobs were a welcome addition.
I certainly used it more than the Monoprice, but every time I thought about printing, I again remembered the frustrating process of sliding the paper round and round, trying to get it just right so I didn't carve grooves all over my build plate and damage the extruder nozzle. Then I wanted to start printing in stronger materials besides PLA, in my case PETG, and was really disappointed in its performance. Anything but the simplest of shapes would come out with massive stringing and what felt like a quarter of the time the print would fail. Besides a few bursts where I would pick up interest in printing again, it too just collected dust for the past couple years.
Earlier this month, I was staring at it next to my desk, thinking about how if it just had auto bed-leveling, how much more I would use it. Then an impulsive thought filled my head, I checked my bank account, and justified it to myself to get a new 3D printer.
Although there's a bit of hate for Creality online, I really enjoyed my original Ender 3 and for the relatively low price of < $300, I thought it was a worthy investment. The hurdle that always turned me away from printing was the leveling process, so auto-leveling was mandatory for my upgrade. Assembly was a fairly simple, albeit nerve-wracking process.
When I started my first print, I was amazed at how fast it was able to do it. It shipped with the gcode for "Benchie" and a little over 20 minutes later, there was a perfect little plastic boat. The process was so hands-off once I pressed print, no need to babysit the first few layers to ensure proper adhesion, no need to grab any little bits of filament stuck to the nozzle, it just worked. Hell if you slapped an Apple logo on it and painted it white, I would've believed it was from them.
I've done a number of more prints since then, including a euphonium mouthpiece for Roomie's horn and still get blown away at how fast it prints and precise the end product comes out as. I feel that spark for printing I once had again, and I'm eager to keep using this amazing machine.
I haven't regularly used Windows since 2016. Here and there I would spin up a VM to run a piece of software, or struggle to get something semi-functional in WINE, but for the most part I have been able to keep the OS off any of my computers, using open source software to do pretty much everything I needed or finding workarounds wherever possible. However, that changed this semester; for one of my programming classes a professor is using his own graphics API which I couldn't get working on Linux for the life of me and settled for doing it in a VM, which, although clunky and slow, got the job done. This solution was short lived, with my Biology class requiring us to use Respondus Lockdown Browser for our exams, which doesn't have a Linux build, excluding Chrome OS.
The worst part is that the exams are in person, making the requirement nearly pointless. It's all multiple choice, so someone typing away at a search would stick out like a sore thumb. Lockdown Browsers are easily the most idiotic solution to the problem of cheating, since a second device easily curtails any of the attempts of thwarting academic dishonesty and smartphones are ubiquitous. My prior solution of running it in VM wouldn't suffice, since the browser checks for that. As the first exam date crept ever closer I began searching for a solution.
First I tried renting a computer from the school, thinking it was going to be an easy process of going to the IT desk and checking one out. It turns out you have to get a professor to Email them first or can only rent it out for four hours at a time from the library, and I didn't want interact with this professor (who I particularly dislike) for any more than the bare minimum and the library opens at the same time the class starts, disqualifying that option. Not to mention the mountain of spare laptops I have and the desire not to take a laptop from someone who actually needs one for daily use.
So I scoured for that old Windows 10 install ISO I had lying around in a long forgotten ISOs folder I had on an old hard drive, burned it to a USB and plugged it into the laptop I intended to use, only for it to respond "No bootable medium found, please insert a disk and try again".
I wanted to verify it booted on my daily laptop and sure enough it started without issue, so I plugged in my USB to sata and tried installing it that way, only to find out Windows won't let you install to a USB! WHY?!?! Please Microsoft! Then I remembered a number of years ago I was able to create a Windows USB using a Rufus, problem was the software is only available on Windows. So I tried starting it in WINE, where it couldn't see any of the drives. Then I found out I accidentally deleted the Windows VM I had made the week prior for the programming class so I needed to make another one. Finally after what had been about three hours, I had a disk with Windows installed. I plugged it into the spare laptop and after 30 minutes of loading screens, I was staring at a years-out-of-date bare Windows desktop. I go to connect to the internet only to find the wifi card drivers weren't installed, nor the ethernet. I copied over one driver after another using yet another USB drive, with no luck. So I finally caved and plugged it into my daily. Finally wifi!
I ran the updates while I was at work and installed Respondus when I got home. I ran it and crossed my fingers only for it to notify me I couldn't start it because Skype was running in the background. Why Skype is an autostarted program in a bare Windows install escapes me, but after I closed it I finally got it started and called it a day.
That takes us to today, where about a fifth of the class, running their computers on the OS that was shipped with them, were unable to start Lockdown Browser and have to take it at a later date. This is why you don't require overly paranoid cheating counter-measures, it stops people from actually completing the task at hand, but that would be too reasonable for Professor I. I pray this issue discourages her from using it in future exams.
Part of it comes from not knowing what to write it in. I'll think of a utility I want to build and think how simple it would be to just string together a few shell commands. Then I'll want more, think of a new feature to add, and remember I don't really like writing more than a dozen lines in bash, and so I'll switch to python. Then I'll feel that urge to write it in something else, something with a better type system, something compiled. I'll think "maybe it's time to finally learn Rust", get a few lines in, and realize I have no clue where to go from there and it would be better to learn it on a smaller project. Then I'll think of doing it in C, but then think of all the high-level things I'd want to be doing a realize a different language would be better for that, bringing me back to python. This circle will go on for days before I finally settle on something.
Every time a utility that was not automated in the past fails, I think to myself: "Bot-World". Bot-World is growing ever wide ranging, whether it be card-readers failing at the store or needing to wave your hands around automatic faucets, only for them to activate for a microsecond, barely rinsing them off. There seems to be a computer chip in just about everything now and it's inconvenient for human life. The amount of times I was unable to wash my hands because a touch-free soap dispenser failed to sense my hand far surpasses any benefit of not spreading surface-contact germs that would be found in a traditional human-operated soap dispenser. In almost every instance, these automated alternatives work worse than their human-operated counterparts.
From an engineering perspective, it's comical that these took off in the first place. A traditional sink is made up of a few valves which are operated by a simple pair of handles, sometimes a single handle if you want to be fancy. These mechanisms have been iterated upon for hundreds of years, if a part breaks just about any hardware store would carry something to fix it. By automating them it adds a whole layer of complexity that was not present before. With the automated system you require electrical lines to be run, a sensor, a chip to activate the valve, and a solenoid valve. All of these can fail and result in an unusable sink, one that likely requires proprietary parts to repair. Simple systems are robust, complex ones are fragile.
There's also a sense of control that comes along with these systems. The sink only turns on for a second so you can't "waste" water, they deny your humanity, your capability to reason how much water is really too much; They know better than you after all. The elevator at my friend's apartment requires you scan a key card to use it and will only let you go to the floor you live on. You can't be trusted to go anywhere else in the building after all, you can't be trusted because you're lesser. You can't be trusted to make copies of the keys, we have ultimate authority on who can enter your place of residence, not you. You are lesser, you cannot be trusted, you are the rabble.
What sort of world do we want to build? One of science fiction, controlled by sparking circuits and flimsy light-sensors, that create more problems than they solve? Or one for humans, that have hands that can turn handles, feet that can press peddles, and legs that can move miles. Do we want to build a world for us or for the bots?